Welcome! There are a lot of other dabblers and tech-interested folks on here, so you'll fit in quite well I'm sure.
I've had good luck with Hugo, and generally like it (although I find its way of making website templates to be a lot more complicated than, IMO, it needs to be). Still, simple modifications of existing templates hasn't proven to be too hard.
For an improvement to MS Word, are you familiar with typst? It's a relatively new project that is seeking to become a replacement for LaTeX. While it's not *quite* as feature-rich as LaTeX, it's a lot cleaner from a code standpoint, and does most things just fine. It also has a lot more built-in scripting (based on Rust, which is what the underlying app is made with). They have an online editor/compiler that is currently free, an offline version, and the whole project is open source.